That is interesing indeed. I did not see the mention of A15 anywhere - is that reliable? If that is true then it opens a wider market for Apple to deploy the A6. E.g A15 gets around the 4GB limit in memory. This means the A6 could appear in smartbooks (macbook air??) sometime soon.

Rick, the biggest news on the chip side was that the A6 would be based on a dual-core A15, not a quad-core A9. This is significant as it's the first consumer implementation of the A15, and they seem to have cracked the battery life issue.

Please, forget that "US-centric" mindset from time to time. NFC is a framework that brings services for transport, payment, loyalty, etc...
For your information, all of the new POS from Ingenico and VeriFone are now NFC compliant and ready for Paywave and Paypass payment applications. Regarding swipe of credit card, just have a look at the level of fraud. It's huge.

For those of us looking for practical NFC implementations, there is a way to do it -- China style. China Mobile is using SIM card to embed NFC technology, so that consumers need to just replace their SIM cards instead of phones.
Read the story I just posted here:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4396106/NFC-enabled-mobile-phones---China-style

Re NFC, I think you are right. A lot of infrastructure building is required before the NFC phone becomes useful. Of course, if it is a place like Japan, where NTT Docomo can create a closed NFC environment, your NFC phone works everywhere, and it is actually pretty cool.